David Schweikert: “Being someone who worked on this amendment last year--and I appreciate my next-door neighbor and my old friend, Matt…”

“Being someone who worked on this amendment last year--and I appreciate my next-door neighbor and my old friend, Matt Salmon, for bringing it up--for those of us from Arizona, we actually have some very intimate experience with sort of dealing with these mechanics. For almost all of us in this body, we run for office telling everyone that immigration is a Federal issue. You know, we need to set Federal policy, and that's how we mechanically will come up with our commonality of enforcement. But what happens when, all of a sudden, we have a municipality that's still taking those Federal dollars and yet is not playing under the same rules as their next-door neighbor municipalities? The beauty of this amendment is very, very simple. It says, if you're going to take these resources, you need to play by the rule book that we in Congress set on an issue that we're supposed to be dominant on. And the reality of it is, when you have a municipality that, through stated policy, flaunts what we're trying to do, particularly in immigration policy, it ends up creating this sort of balkanization in our communities, and it sets off those very fights that I believe our last speaker was touching on.…”